


Fight or flight

by Ruta



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Aftermath, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Post-The Final Problem, What-If
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-30
Updated: 2017-01-30
Packaged: 2018-09-21 00:38:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,538
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9523541
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ruta/pseuds/Ruta
Summary: [Molly doesn't say the words, the screen turns off and Sherlock believes her to be dead, with all the baggage of wrenching emotions that follows.]Molly Hooper was safe, but not to her credit. If it had depended entirely on her, she wouldn’t be saved at all, and this,thisalmost makes him ill more than her death.Jus post bellum, he thought and acted accordingly.





	

There had been a war.

There had been a war and he had just won another battle, although at that time the judgment he had expressed on the matter had not been this. While the adrenaline had stopped to stimulate his sympathetic nervous system, releasing at the synaptic level in the adrenal gland and diverting the blood flow to his muscles and - but it wasn’t the point.

The salient point was that when he thought he had won, that he would win, was precisely then that he had lost. And with the term 'lost', he meant something more akin to the definition of 'shamefully ignored' and 'deprivation' and 'waste of intentions and desires'.

When he had thought that Molly Hooper was dead, each previous action, every thought, the very concept of objectivity and representation of reality had been wiped out, suddenly becoming futile under the destructive range of that notion.

The knowledge that she - soft smiles, bright colors, eyes of liquid devotion, a white lily on a black background - no longer existed, that she was lost in the flow of unspoken words and nuanced possibilities, had annihilated a light inside him, small yet powerful and brightest of any star.

And from the ashes of that light extinguished forever, the man he might have become, that he was one step away from becoming, had died with her.

That was until he discovered that it wasn’t true, that he had been taken in by appearances. Ruthlessly, horribly, brutally deceived.

Molly Hooper was unharmed, returned from the dead and the previous emotional context had been replaced by a deleterious resentment, a state of absolute negativity, her death that despite everything continued to weigh on his heart, an acute and persistent pain that radiated in the left side of the chest as the result of an injury or infection.

Molly Hooper was safe, but not to her credit. If it had depended entirely on her, she wouldn’t be saved at all, and this, _this_ almost makes him ill more than her death. In death, he would have idealized her, purging her. In life, however, the miscalculation of which she was guilty became a very serious omission, unforgivable.

 _Jus post bellum_ , he thought and acted accordingly.  

 

*  

 

Speech is power: speech is to persuade, to convert, to compel.

**Ralph Waldo Emerson**

 

_"I love you."_

_The words slip too easily, but it's a minor detail, certainly noteworthy, but right now it doesn't matter._

_He said it. Now she will do the same, and -_ Why does she not say the words?

_The timer continues its countdown. Still fifteen seconds. Fourteen. Thirteen. One part of his brain records the time that remains available while the other is in the grip of apprehension and a flurry of other emotions, too many to classify them._

_"_ _Molly? Molly,_ please _!"_

_He sees her shut her eyes as if he had struck a blow treacherously, shrink in a sigh that sucks every color from her contracted face. He sees her and is like seeing her corpse, pale and lifeless, lying in the coffin behind him._

_"I_ _... cannot. I'm sorry, but I canno -"_

 _The_ _communication line is interrupted abruptly. The resulting pain is so cacophonous and predominant that erases all traces of external noise. The darkness that welcomes him behind his closed eyelids is no less abhorrent than the off screen._

A world without Molly Hooper.

_"Time is over. What a pity. She looked like a cute little thing, so sweet. Oh, don’t make that face, Sherlock! Emotional context, remember? Now, compose yourself, the next will not be as easy -"_

*

 

Every man lies, but give him a mask and he will be sincere.

**Oscar Wilde**

 

 

  
"You cannot avoid dealing with her forever. I think you've sulked enough."

John spoke with calm because for once he would like to try to be reasonable.

The dismissive verse that Sherlock produces - a throat laugh, hoarse and with a bitter sound that reflects a sphere of feelings that are not at all sincere fun - would in itself be a sufficient answer, enough to persuade most people to yield weapons, or at least to convince them to desist from fighting a battle that time and circumstances have made very clear was lost from the beginning.

John Watson, however, is _not_ the most of people.

To prove it, he has a constellation of scars, some visible and many that are not. His gait no longer owns the martial pace of old; the smile in his eyes exhibits sediments of regret each time gets lost in the void, usually blind corners of the room or empty seats on the Tube or, as in this case, a comfortable looking yellow chair that no one has ever used since its purchase given the explicit, categorical prohibition of the owner.

There are so many things that seven years of friendship with Sherlock Holmes taught him (pick up signals, locate clues in microscopic details), as many as he learned in his years of shared life with Mary.

The first lesson is perhaps the most important of all. Everyone lies, at every opportunity. Why do they? It is mostly pure instinct of preservation, a form of protection.

And here's another thing that he has learned: that behind their motives there is the difference between the good people and those that are not. While the good people tend to lie to protect someone, the bad ones do it to protect their undeserving ass. The profit is the conclusion of the first lesson. Discover the self-interest behind an action and you're already one step ahead in the search for the culprit.

In this case, the profit has a face, a perfume, a voice and the name to which this face, smell and voice belong is _not_ Sherlock Holmes.

 _Oh_ , John thinks with sudden clarity. What a moron he has been.

He knows 'how', knows 'why' and 'when' yet the truth eluded him until now.

No matter the gloomy frown on his face, the air of storm that asphyxiates the apartment, his sculpted pose like that of a wax figure, the absence of expression in his distracted eyes and thousands of miles away. What matters is the nervousness of the hands that he cannot keep still, but that move restlessly, now tracing the edges of the chair arms, now performing the notes of a troublemakers symphony on the knee, now stressing that forest of dark and rebels curls that droops on the broad forehead.

 _Oh_. The moment of clarity widens like a bubble of unreality around him, filling the silence with the tragedy of the unspoken words, with the quiet and heartbreaking nature of truths left to decompose in deep wells.

John lets the bubble encompass him, until the emotional context becomes excessive. 

He knows why Sherlock is reacting this way and he cannot say that he is totally wrong. In the past Sherlock has always relied on Molly, on her complicity in the hour of need and her inability - or rather, lack of desire - to deny any of the countless favors that he demanded from her. Although over the years the nature of their relationship has evolved into something strange and intimate of which he is still not able to fully grasp the characteristics, of one thing he can be sure.

Sherlock could forgive her everything, any opposition, but not this one. He could forgive her everything, but in Sherrinford, when she refused to say the words, exposing herself directly to danger, when the connection was interrupted and all of them believed that the inevitable had happened, John saw something in Sherlock, something he acknowledged for have seen it in the mirror, after Mary’s death.

_Is it horrible, isn’t it? The extent to which you hate her as much as you love her._

John shakes his head. Contrary to what he hoped, nothing will exonerate him from using brute force if it were to become necessary.

  
*

 

_"Jesus Christ!"_

_John’s exclamation forces Sherlock to situate him in his sphere of interest._

_In doing so, he diverts his gaze from the ghost that is before him. An hallucination, but optical illusion or not, the concern that stiffens her facial muscles, making her collapse the shoulders and the back is real. The scent that he seems to pick up in the night breeze is a critical to his reasoning, the proof of his daze and is caused by an alteration of the electrical activity in the brain that is spreading rapidly._

_It will get worse. Soon, he will begin to hear her voice, soft and tinted by a tone of reproach that is made sweeter - and for that reason all the more tiring for him to handle - by the obvious affection that accompanies it._

_"Sherlock, Mycroft texted. It’s about Molly. She is alive! Molly is alive! Sherlock, did you hear me? Sherlock-"_

_Fainting, he records clearly before entering into a chronostasis. The laws of time recede, along with the vehemence of John's voice that is screaming to Greg to bring a car._

_Molly's face becomes translucent like a spider web made of dew and is traversed by the headlamps of the squad’s vehicles. The warmth of her hand on his cheek is a reminder and it’s a lie, but one which he doesn’t intend to expose, not yet._

_"_ _Come find me, Sherlock Holmes," she sighs, resting her forehead against his. Her sigh encloses the kiss that she would like to give to him, the words that she chose not to tell him. It fits perfectly the oxymoron that she has always been._  

 

*

 

The morgue is quiet and desperately meaningless without her. So quiet that resembles one of his nightmares.

When he hears the door to push open, he doesn’t turn around. He knows that it’s her. He could identify her by the sound of footsteps, the fragrance that accompanies her - tapered, floral, so typically Molly - but ultimately it is the way he listens to her holding her breath that makes him recognize her.

An impulse too strong to win moves him to look at her. What he sees shouldn’t bring him any pleasure, but it is a testimony to the fact that she's alive. So he registers as a source of grim satisfaction the pronounced dark circles, the pallor of those who do not get enough sleep, the weight loss that the clothing doesn’t manage to conceal. The tremor in the fingers, which she hastens to hide in the pockets of the lab coat, is the last detail, along with the shame and guilt that at first make her blush and then suddenly turn pale. 

Molly jumps. She bites her lip and snuggles a bit the shoulders, head down. An attitude that has the nostalgic flavor of the things lost in fire, the vertigo of a leap into the unknown, of a farewell that was never final. 

Sherlock wouldn’t, _shouldn’t_ let himself be moved by it. The memory of Sherrinford is still vividly engraved in his mind.

And yet, he thinks with feeling, she's _alive_. Molly Hooper is in front of him, a creature of blood and bone which breathes and which with each beat has a functioning heart that pumps oxygen into the arteries.  

The relief is deafening. Her death sent him into blackout. See her alive enriches the world of so many shades of color that blind him.And even so, the miracle of seeing her in this state adds salt on the open wound of her supposed demise and a new wave of anger, resentment and despair overwhelms him like a high tide flow. 

 _Fight or flight_ , John’s voice intimates as an ultimatum. So Sherlock decides to fight. 

 

* 

 

_Molly realizes that something is wrong when she opens the front door._

_In the semi-darkness of the landing, Sherlock looks like a supernatural apparition thrown out of a gothic novel._

_He is pale as if he had looked death in the face, a sheen of sweat sprinkles his forehead. He trembles perceptibly as if his legs fail to sustain the torment of the soul in them._

_(He’s wearing a hospital gown, under the Belstaff. Why should he -)_

_"Molly," he murmurs dreamily and there is rapture in the way his wide-open eyes linger on her face, bewildered wonder, a feeling that is no longer shown in glimpses and hints and concessions, but prevailed._

_Sherlock steps unsteadily towards her. She notes in slow motion the body lurching forward and at the same time she moves to welcome it against hers._ _He stiffens before relaxing. He puts his arm behind her back, his nose pressed against her neck while his other hand touches convulsively her wrist, looks for the radial vein with the index and middle finger. He squeezes and squeezes as if their lives depended on it, as if his sanity were at stake._

_Molly whispers in his ear reassuring words, promises that by now she has kept for years. "I'm not going anywhere. I'm here, Sherlock. I'm fine."_

_She knows_ _that something is terribly wrong. She has the absolute certainty of it when John and Greg appear from the stairs - their faces equally afflicted by fatigue and relief - and they start yelling accusations and recriminations._

 _Sherlock loosens his grip around her and suddenly his weight becomes too much to bear._ _Molly kneels on the floor, Sherlock’s inanimate body crushing her._

 _While John swears colorfully, Greg helps her up and with low tones, softly, he tells her the story of how she is (not) dead._  

 

* 

 

"You died that day."

Molly winces. No matter how often they repeated it to her, every time is horrible like the first. That pain - so small compared to the pain that she knows has caused to him – doesn’t fade.

"I know," she sighs. "Greg was very exhaustive when he told me. I'm sorry, but I could not know that -"

"You should have known," he interrupts viciously. His eyes flash with anger, accusingly. "You had to understand that I would never have hurt you deliberately unless under torture or because I had no other choice."

"Oh, really?" She wants to slap him to bring a little common sense into that wooden-head. Molly would like to indulge more than willingly to the impulse and she would do it if it weren’t for the spark of betrayal and panic that he still has in his eyes every time he looks at her. That spark makes her hands itching for a whole other set of reasons and desires. _Console, not punish. Touch tenderly, not wound._

Molly folds her arms across her chest and raise her chin defiantly. Actually she feels tired and drained, but cannot let it show, not to him. "What, in heaven's name, should have led me to believe such a thing? It has already happened in the past. It's true, I concede that, you don’t do it on purpose, but you hurt me constantly. At first you did with your caustic remarks, then with your death, after with the drugs. I have always supported you, I did everything in my power to assist you, to show you that I was a valuable ally, so forgive me, please, if for once I tried to protect _me_ , I gave priority to _my_ feelings rather that to yours."

"The situation was drastic and as such demanded equivalent precautionary measures."

"I couldn’t know!"

"Yes, you could!" He growls, and all traces of composure disappears, revealing pieces of meat torn by the beast that was released from the cage. "You could, damn it, but you preferred to focus on the injustice and abuse that I was doing to you, while I was asking another impossible demand! You know who I am; you've always known. A bastard. Manipulative, arrogant, heartless, unhelpful. Yet you loved that man."

 _I still love him_. Molly squeezes her eyes shut. "I'm sorry, but I cannot handle this conversation right now." She is not ready, maybe she will never be. "You must leave."

When she walks past him, she is not surprised by the fact that he follows her. She is when his hand tightens firmly around her shoulder and forces her to turn around and face him.

"You don’t get the point! No matter that it wasn’t true. I thought you were." The anguish in his feverish voice is a slap in the face, as are his dilated pupils, the grimace of pain that twists his mouth. "Loss of consciousness and of all neurological functions, stopped circulation and respiration. Dehydration. Cooling. Livor mortis. Rigor mortis. Acidification of tissues. _Dead_ , Molly." There's hardness and severity where until a moment before there was irritation and acrimony, while he relentlessly outlines the changes to which a body undergoes after death. "Like the girl in the cold chamber number 4. Like the man in the 11. The child in the 6. The old man in the -"

"I know who my patients are, Sherlock!" She jerks free of his grasp, bloody furious. "And I know just as well the cadaverous phenomena, thank you!"

"You were dead, you’d could be dead." He grits his teeth, giving no sign of having heard a word of what she said. "Just because you didn’t want to say you loved me, just because you have been so cruel to not - "

" _Cruel_?" Molly takes a step back, horrified. Somewhere inside her, she felt the backlash of that infamous accusation, but she reserves to herself the privilege to not cry. She swallows and sees him do the same. For once, he seems disgusted by his own words. "If you really think that of me, I want you to leave now and never comes back. I may have been selfish, but cruel? I'm not the cruel one here, do you hear me? _That's not me_."

"Why?" He whispers. "I have to know. Why could you not just say it? Why you demanded me to say it?"

"I was wrong," she whispers in turn and her eyes become moist without she can do anything to avoid it. "I thought - I _hoped_ it would be simpler to say it if you'd done it first, but it wasn’t, made it only more difficult. How could I tell you that I loved you? You'd just have to lie, to pretend to feel something that wasn’t true." She blinks to disperse the tears and she rubs with annoyance the incandescent trajectory that runs through her cheek. "How could I say that I loved you after I had done such a thing? What kind of love it is one that hurts and destroys, and -"

"And one that kills?" He interrupted. "What kind of love is, one so?”

Tears cloud her sight, but don’t prevent her to see, to _observe_. "Sherlock," she says in a voice choked by emotion and puts a hand to her throat to stifle a sob.

"I would have killed you." The prospect makes him tighten his eyes and his expression is one of pure agony, one that she would like to erase with caresses and kisses. "Our relationship, my feelings for you would have done that. On that day, if you were dead, it would been my fault."

"Say it again."

He nods guiltily, taking it as an order. "It was my fault," he repeats blankly.

"No, not that bit." She shakes her head. "The previous one, about your feelings. Do you have feelings? For me?"

"Don’t be silly. Is it not obvious?" He frowns, the idea that she has not understood it until now leaves him stunned, seems ridiculous to him. "Why do you think-"

Molly gets up on her toes and hugs him, not giving him time to finish. He stiffens as the night when he went to see her, running away from the hospital, the night he had to make sure she was really alive, no matter what had been reported to him by others. And just like that night, he relaxes in her embrace the next instant and reciprocates it with equal force. His arms don’t tremble as then because of physical and mental exhaustion and if they close around her waist with more force than necessary, Molly doesn’t point it out.

There are new nightmares to disturb his nights, now she knows it. A new sorrow, of a different type.

"I cannot tell you again. What happened to Sherrinford marked me." Sherlock pulls away just enough to get his eyes to the same height of hers. "I am no longer the same man. I could never again say it to you. Do you think you can accept it?"

 _I could never again say it to you._ The words sink into her and hurt, she would lie if she said otherwise.

"As long as I can feel it, you don’t have to put it in words," she reassures him and runs her fingers through his hair. For that, decides, she will suffice. "I love you, Sherlock."

He takes her other hand, the one she had unconsciously placed on his heart, brings it to his lips and kissed her knuckles with devotion. His smile is free of sharp edges, his voice is without shadows. His gaze is a sufficient declaration of everything she needs to know.

"I know," he says with a lopsided smirk and bends down to kiss her.

 


End file.
